The pedestal reverence of white men (particularly in the deep South) for their women and their insane ritual of making the black man a disemboweled corpse are like hideous mirrors reflecting the white man's sexual agony and his paranoic terror of the mythic big black superdick having universal congress with the mythic white supercunt.

But unlike his peers who readily identified with the hard-boiled superdicks played by Humphrey Bogart and William Powell, Dyer found it easier to relate to the villains and supporting characters like Clifton Webb's prissy Waldo in Laura and Peter Lorre's scented sissy in The Maltese Falcon.